It was night already and the deadline for the submission of the assignment was the very next day. The assignment was a big one and no one in the entire third year Computer Science and Engineering department had finished it yet. But there was not even an iota of anxiety in anyone’s mind. After all, the only thing we could think of was feasting our eyes on the pretty girls with their hands up in the air swaying their hips in euphoria to Euphoria. Ha! Who cares about a goddamn assignment? We danced our worries away far into the night.

It was indeed the best time of the year. The enchantment of Anwesha, the annual cultural fest of IIT Patna (IITP), makes you forget everything else and the world all of a sudden becomes a very tiny place. Be it an event like “Beg, Borrow, Steal,” in which different teams are supposed to collect and bring a list of items in a given time or an event like “Tamasha,” containing questions from movies and TV shows. Anwesha is all about frolic, fun and creativity. It presents numerous fun events like “StockMart,” which is a virtual stock exchange and “Darpan,” an event in which you get to paint on walls. And, if you are an engineering student, you are bound to fall in love a lot of times in those three days.

I remember participating in “Beg, Borrow, Steal” last year and there was a task which required that a guy come back with a lipstick mark on his hand. I summoned up all my courage and went up to a very beautiful girl with lipstick in my hand and an “Excuse me.” But as soon as the beauty turned around and looked at me, I froze. I could not mutter a single intelligible word (for real), let alone ask her for giving me a peck on my hand. Her friends, apparently, had a great time watching the whole scene. Before I approached her, I doubted if I had a shot. Now, with her big gorgeous blue eyes looking straight into mine, I knew, for sure that I, clearly, stood no chance whatsoever. I hung my head and quietly walked away. Phew! Finally, I had to put lipstick on my lips and kiss my own hand (Yes, there is always a way). It did not go in vain eventually as our team won the competition.

Anwesha is a beautiful expression of art at its best. As it seems, we cannot express all our emotions in words, because if we could, we would not have needed art in the first place. This is, in fact the beauty of it. The artist has dreamed his painting, he painted his dream and called it “Anwesha.” It is always beautiful to see how two colors when put one next to the other, sing and how a small piece of art manages to enthrall the deepest of your senses – manages to effortlessly express something which even a thousand words cannot. It is perplexing how a picture can be so charismatic that it begins to speak a language of its own, and convey a mood and an atmosphere in a single frame, without the slightest incongruity in it.

Anwesha expresses, in absolute subtlety, the journey of this spectacle and that of IITP as a whole. It is as if it becomes absolutely natural to imagine random stripes in an abstract picture to be paths couching the indelible memories in the journey, and the paths that are yet to be trodden. There have been multifarious emotions, disparate hues, but the grit to move on has surely been unflinching. But, we are still in a stage of infancy and there is a huge room for improvement. Gaining the trust of more and more sponsors, and people is what needs to be done now. There are a lot of obstacles that we have to overcome if we have to challenge the likes of Mood Indigo (IIT Bombay) and Rendezvous (IIT Delhi). It is definitely not a cakewalk and that is exactly what makes it so much more fun.

This article is part of PaGaLGuY’s innovative internship certification programme for engineering students. Currently, two such programmes are on – one is an Internship in Creative Writing, and the other is a Certification in Digital Media. If you are interested in partaking and bagging a certificate, besides learning the nuances of effective writing, write to us at [email protected].